American Hubris

I don’t recall now where I heard this most recently, but it’s so common a meme that it doesn’t matter, so I won’t bother with a citation. The theory is that we should be aware that to be poor in America is not so bad because, relative to many other places in the world, it is actually rich. Other places in the world people live under a sheet stretched between poles and get by on $1 per day. Of course, when using this meme, being “poor in America” usually remains conveniently undefined.

Poor might, for instance, mean being homeless; without even a sheet to stretch between poles or a place to do that. There are people in this country who fit that definition, you know; quite a lot of them. There are private charities who care for them on a rather hit-or-miss basis but, as a nation, we do nothing for them.

Poor might mean living in a one-bedroom house and feeding a family on, say, $10 per day by working at two jobs, neither of which provides what we call in this country “benefits.” That certainly is better than the person living under the sheet on $1 daily, but if the person comes down with a preventable illness and dies from it because they could not afford medical treatment, what good does the one-bedroom house and the $10 per diem do them? They are unnecessarily dead.

Being poor is not good. It does not matter where you are poor, being poor is a miserable and unsustainable condition. A great nation does not tolerate it.

Chris Matthews is an Idiot

The drumbeat goes on about how unemployment compensation causes people not to look for jobs. I don’t really know the truth of that, but I can tell you that my own experience would certainly debunk it. I was laid off once many decades ago and drew unemployment for a few weeks before I found a new job, and it was the worst weeks of my life. I found it humiliating and was in a desperate hurry to find a job.

Some guy was on Hardball saying that unemployment does permit people to be a little more choosy about the kind of job they seek, and that they might be turning down available jobs that they feel are not worthy of them until the unemployment benefits run out, and his argument made a certain amount of sense to me.

Chris Matthews was outraged by it however. (Yes, I’m still watching his show so that you don’t have to.) Citing his son who is an actor and who works as a busboy when he is not actively in an acting role,

They announced a job like at a restaurant for busboys, which is a fairly an entry level job. Not waiter which could be pretty professional obviously, a busboy. The lines go around the corner. They‘re like trying to get an acting job. How you can say that there aren‘t people looking for work at pretty much at the entry level job? Not the perfect job, the highly or semi-skilled job, but basic work. And these jobs have lines around the corner. Every time a hotel opens, the lines are around the corner for two or three blocks. Why do you say there aren‘t unemployed people that really want to work out there, who don‘t really want to work?

His rant went on at great length and, as is usual with him when he’s ranting, it became more and more loaded with adjectives and adverbs to the point that it became essentially unintelligible. I was at times a little confused as to whether the line was for a busboy job or an acting job. At some point he drew a deep breath, as is his wont, and told his guest, “But… Go ahead.”

This is a typical Chris Matthews argument; the evidence in front of you means that there is no evidence which is not in front of you. In this case, the fact that thousands are applying for jobs as busboy is proof there are no other people who are not applying for jobs as busboy. You got that?

Me, I suspect we should extend unemployment benefits, but not based on Chris’s arguments about who is in lines for jobs as busboy.

Olbermann Misses Irony

Keith Olbermann is touting the free health clinics that are being held in New Orleans and elsewhere; clinics to benefit people who do not have health insurance. He doesn't mention that this is still necessary some time after Obama dealt our health care system the "most fundamentally reformative legislation in generations," and forever changed the way health care is managed in our nation. We have to wait until Obama is reelected to see if it will work, of course, or if it actually is reformative. That was in no way a political calulation or anything, you know; "Let people continue to do without health insurance until after I'm reelected."

The "Bush Tax Cuts"

The media is starting to talk about what happens to these tax cuts at the end of this year, and is showing charts that depict their effect on the deficit into the next few decades if "Obama does not rescind them" in January. They are labelled as being the "Bush Tax cuts" well into 2030.

Obama and Congress are, of course, avoiding the subject like the plague until after the November elections, but that's another topic.

There are a few problems with all of that. Obama does not have to rescind them, they self destruct, as in all by themselves, as in expire. In order for them to continue he would have to actively renew them. In which case...

Come 2020 on your fancy charts which show the nation going down in flames due to these tax cuts, your label is inaccurate. Those tax cuts would be the "Obama Tax Cuts" at that point.

When Bush passes a tax cut you can blame Bush for it and call it the "Bush Tax Cut." I guess there is some legitimacy in continuing to call it that after Obama is in office, even though he could have reversed that tax cut once in office and decided not to do so. But when a tax cut is passed while Obama is in office it needs to bear his name. Labelling a tax cut which was signed into law by Obama as the "Bush Tax Cut" is carrying the blame game a bit too far.

Worst Cooking Show Ever

The local cooking guy did a show to help reduce fat in my diet this evening.

First he suggested that I replace the bear claw that I eat for breakfast by having oatmeal instead. Okay, I don't have a bear claw for breakfast and anyway, oatmeal? Yeah, right. I have an idea, I could eat sawdust for my breakfast; that's really low fat.

Then he introduced tuna salad sandwich, replacing the Mayo with - wait for it - cucumbers. Really? Yes, really. Tuna, mustard and cucumbers on whole wheat toast. I don't think I'll try that.

Finally, I've always thought that putting sour cream on one's baked potato was barbaric, given that it's, well, sour cream, but he went all positively Genghis Khan. He pointed out that yogurt has less fat than sour cream and said I should put yogurt on my baked potato instead of sour cream.

Oh, good God. I need a different cooking show.

Changing Congress

I received an email the other day, one that is apparently “making the rounds” that suggests we need to do something about the way that Congress is abusing its power by passing so many laws that apply to the citizenry of the country but not to its own membership. After a fairly lengthy and rather flowery rant it says,

Proposed 28th Amendment to the United States Constitution -

"Congress shall make no law that applies to the citizens of the United States that does not apply equally to the Senators and/or Representatives; and, Congress shall make no law that applies to the Senators and/or Representatives that does not apply equally to the citizens of the United States."

Oh, for God’s sake. It never fails to amaze me, the lengths that American voters will go to in order to avoid taking responsibility for their own destiny.

In the first place, if members of Congress are abusing their power we don’t need a constitutional amendment to change that, we need voters who are paying attention and will vote them out of office or, better yet, call for their impeachment. But the voters don’t do that. They accord Congress a 20% approval rating, complain about how it “never gets anything done,” rant about it being “unaccountable to the people” and then reelect its members to office 94% of the time.

Congress behaves in a manner unaccountable to the people of this nation because the people of this nation do not hold them accountable for their action once they attain office. Election to office, short of sexual congress with a goat on the Capitol steps, is essentially for life, because incumbency assures reelection 94% of the time. It does so not because of performance, but merely due to the inertia of the voters of this nation who are too damn lazy to base their vote on anything other than the number of paid television commercials they happen to catch while watching “America’s Got Talent.”

In the second place, Congress is abusing its power in far more ways than merely passing laws which don’t apply to itself. The proposed amendment merely cures one symptom and leaves the disease unaddressed. If you have a man who is robbing banks, raping, murdering and setting fires, you don’t solve the problem by putting better locks on the damn banks. Better locks, and a constitutional amendment, as a solution to the problem are world class stupidity.

Even now we are being urged to vote for Democrats in the upcoming election in November merely because they are Democrats. Do not, for God’s sake, evaluate the person behind that Democratic label or examine the voting record in Congress. Obama is campaigning in support of Democrats who voted against health care reform.

Vote for the Democrat, the television commercials tell us, or the scary Republican will get into office and things will become so much worse. One television commercial tells us the Republican is lying, and another tells us the Democrat is lying. Count them up and decide by the numbers.

Having It Both Ways

So Obama is having a problem getting jobs stimulus legislation through Congress, is he? Well in part it's a problem of his own making for allowing the myth of 9.7% unemployment to stand. The number is much closer to 17% and he knows that. It has been "fudged" by his predecessor administrations, including Clinton's, to avoid making themselves look bad, and he is allowing the practice to continue to avoid making himself look bad. If he let the real number, 17%, be used he would have an easier time passing his agenda, but then he would look really bad for "causing" much worse unemployment than his predecessors did.

But this is typical of what our executive branch does. If it does not like numbers that cast their governance in an unfavorable light, they "fudge" those numbers to make the numbers look better, to make people believe that things are better than they actually are, and to keep people "asleep at the switch" in the voting booth.

In a similar manner inflation, as reported, does not include housing or energy costs, because those items "are too volatile." In reality, they were dropped from the index because they were rising at a time when the executive branch of our government did not want to report rising inflation.

Military Survey On DADT

The military is doing a survey of its troops regarding the repeal of DADT, and I am about to break out in a rash of snark and outright sarcasm about what has happened to the military since I served in the Navy a bit over forty years ago.

My first thought is that the open service of gays and lesbians is probably less dangerous than the kind of democratic military where the leadership has to get the approval of the troops in order to implement policy. “Sir, I have been deputized to tell you that we don’t like getting shot at, and so we no longer want to attack things.”

My second thought is to wonder if Truman tolerated the generals dragging their feet on integration of the military by saying that they wanted to do a survey of the attitude of the troops before doing what he was telling them to do. “Yes, Mister President, I’ll follow your order, but only after the troops tell me it’s okay with them.” I don't think so.

My third thought is that if troops had been asked how integration of blacks would affect them before it was done, they would have said that it would utterly destroy morale and readiness of the troops. If you asked them that now they would ask you what the fuck you are talking about. (If you don’t like the language, read something else; this piece is for military people and civilians won’t understand it anyway.)

The survey is a masterpiece of bullshit; something at which the military has always excelled. No change there in forty years. The survey finds out if you are married or single; I think married people are less afraid of gays than single people are, so maybe they score the married responses downward.

It then finds out if you have ever served with anyone who you knew to be gay, and how you felt about it. Um, doesn’t that invalidate the “don’t ask” part? Or maybe it violates the "don't tell" part. Crap, I don't know, but I'm sure it violates something.

Anyway, there’s no, “If no then skip to the end of the form,” so you still have to answer the questions about the repeal of DADT and the effect of serving with open gays, which has questions like,

If DADT is repealed and you are working with a Service member in your immediate unit who has said he or she is gay or lesbian, how would that affect your own ability to fulfill your mission during combat?

The underline is theirs. Answers are: Very positively, Positively, Equally as Positively as Negatively, Negatively, Very negatively, No effect, Don’t know or doesn't not apply.

The “Equally as Positively as Negatively” bit is certainly grammatically interesting, but that there is no response for “Would not be able to concentrate on the enemy because I would be afraid that the guy behind me was going to grope me” is, I think, a serious lack in the form.

And, of course, there’s no, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

Update: Tuesday, 1300 hours
They actually could deal with the whole questionairre with a single question: "Do you favor allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military?"

Answers would consist of: "Yes," "No," and "What the fuck are you talking about, they already do."

Obama's "Moral Core"

Andrew Bacevich is a guy I usually read with something approaching reverence. He is a combat veteran himself, has lost a son in Afghanistan, and is a student of the relationship between politics and warfare; not quite a von Clausewitz, but not that far short of him.

He wrote a piece in The New Republic, however, which strikes me as being really over the top in its harshness of Obama’s approach to Afghanistan. If you read me regularly, you will know that I am no fan of Obama’s policy in that misbegotten war, but it seems to me that Bacevich has become almost unhinged in his disappointment at Obama’s performance in office.

He starts by “evaluating” Bush’s war policy, and after a dramatically harsh condemnation of the wars that Bush inflicted on the world, and the motives which Bush used to justify those wars, Bacevich finishes,

Despite all of this and more, George W. Bush never wavered. He remained resolute, his conscience clear. He knew he was doing God’s work. He was—and no doubt remains today—a true believer. The 43d president was a well-intentioned fool, who inflicted grievous harm on his country. Yet when Bush stands before his Maker (or the bar of History), he will say without fear of contradiction: “I did what I thought was right.”

No mention that Bush was the kind of idiot who believes on Wednesday the same things that he believed on Monday, regardless of what happened on Tuesday. No matter that he was the the worst kind of leader; the kind who leads his followers into disaster because he refuses to face the reality that is destroying him and his nation.

He then proceeds to condemn Obama more harshly than he did Bush,

Obama’s supporters were counting on him to bring to the White House an enlightened moral sensibility: He would govern differently not only because he was smarter than his predecessor but because he responded to a different—and truer—inner compass.

Events have demolished such expectations. Today, when they look at Washington, Americans see a cool, dispassionate, calculating president whose administration lacks a moral core.

I understand the disappointment. I hoped for more from Obama than I am seeing him deliver. I accept the limitations that Washington places on him; my disappointment lies in his acceptance of those limitations, in that he doesn’t even seem to try for the transformational changes that he promised. Health care, for instance, was big and expensive but was in no way transformational; we still have health care delivered by the for-profit insurance model, it’s just bigger and includes more people.

But to say that Obama’s administration “lacks a moral core” is so hyperbolic a course of thought as to lead the user not only out of the Solar System, but possibly out of the known universe.

That moral core has to some degree been subsumed by political necessity, and even at times taken a back seat to political expedience, and it is that which makes me nervous. It was the Bush Administration which had no moral core, and as such it was normal and expected that it would act in, at best, an amoral fashion.

Obama has, I believe, a strong moral core and set of principles and his administration often delivers on the promise that we voted for. But it sometimes and in some ways does not, and that is what it is so worrisome. The Bush crowd was just doing what I expected the Bush crowd to do, but I worry when I see a morally centered administration acting in the amoral ways that the Obama administration sometimes adopts.

Chris Matthews is an Idiot

Chris Matthews is saying, as we speak, that Republicans are sabotaging themselves in November by running whackos in Senate races that should be easy Republican wins. He's assuming that whackos cannot win, but he routinely speaks of, and with, Senators such as John Kyl of Arizona, Inhofe of Oklahoma, Jim DeMint of South Carolina and, of course, the infamous Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. Not to mention that John McCain has won repeatedly in Arizona. Whackos can't win? Really?

After Chuck Todd scoffs at Sarah Palin's campaign funding and says, "Wake me up when she's for real," Chris Matthews says that Palin, "has a political operation befitting someone with presidential aspirations." Omigod.

He "Finishes" with an editorial about how all of the taxes that we pay "covers only three things; Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid." Actually, not one penny of general revenue taxes goes toward either of first two of those things. Each of them is funded by its own trust fund, with each trust being funded by a payroll deduction.

As Keith Olbermann would say, "That man is an idiot."

Wierd Weather Again

The NOAA weather site has done this before; they put a red warning on the main page, linking to a page about hazardous weather in the offing.

Then when you click on the link you see this:

On the better side, at 8:30 this morning the sun was shining and the temp was already in the high 60's. The forecast is for a high near eighty, and that this will continue through next weekend, so I am gradually attaining a better frame of mind as this forecast shows signs of believability.

Do Something Visible

I was reading an exchange on another blog in which the usefulness of the “stimulus” was being debated. One defender based the usefulness of the bill on, “we have nicely paved roads that have not been paved in twenty years.”

Really? Paving roads is maintenance. As a businessman, you know what I would call a business which had to borrow money to perform overdue maintenance? Bankrupt. If the stimulus went for basic, overdue and unperformed maintenance, then I’m not really willing to call it a huge success. Paving roads is really short term, and if those were “new jobs,” they didn’t last very long.

Another commenter said that Obama made the mistake of “focusing on saving jobs rather than creating them.” I don’t think he did that at all; I think the “saving jobs” rhetoric was something that the administration came up with after no really visible new jobs had been created.

Yet another pointed out that “there is a sign on every highway project saying the project is funded by the ARRA.” Well, yes, that’s the problem; that sign is on every project, which tends to detract from its credibility.

There is a major project on I-15 just north of my house, and when freeway construction first started getting hit in 2004, CalTrans assured us that that particular one was the first priority in the state and would never be cut back under any circumstances. It is still proceeding, but has slowed a bit due to the nature of its construction, and it has – you guessed it - a sign saying that it is funded by the ARRA.

One person claimed, as Obama himself has done, that unemployment would have been much higher without the stimulus. Yes, and if the dog hadn’t stopped running he’d have caught the rabbit, too. Unless the rabbit outran the dog, or ducked down a hole, or…

My point is not that the stimulus didn’t work. I don’t know if the damned thing worked or not. If it did work, though, you’d think we’d be seeing better defenses of it than the flimsy sort of things that we tend to get. In any case, it only matters now in terms of how it affects what do we do next, and what we should be drawing from it is that whatever we do next needs to be a damned sight more visible.

Google Gets It Wrong

This blog is hosted by Google, and it has many very nice features. It also "logs me out" at unpredictable intervals for no discernable reason. Not a big deal, but slightly annoying.

It's hard to describe just how much I loathe what Google has done to the news aggregator that I have been using for several years. The new format puts about 10% as many headlines on a page as formerly, is in a much less friendly format, and is only marginally customizeable. Why they departed from a format which was so successful that it was emulated by everyone and went to a format that presents one-tenth of the content escapes me. I'm learning to like the MSN news page.

To add insult to injury, they put up a poll asking how you like the new format, and the poll does not work properly. The button set that you click on is not the set that changes, and the questions are therefor unanswerable.

Chuck Todd Gets It Right

Chuck Todd says of Sarah Palin, "I don't get it, I don't buy it."

His cogent comment is near the end of this short clip and sums up what the idiotic Palin clique is all about. He seems to be in my group of people who think she's a posturing idiot.

Dethroning The Queen

Danica Patrick returned to stock car racing last night; finished 24th, two laps down to the leader. What's interesting about that is that the television coverage of the race only showed her a couple of times, basically when the leader was passing her, and the Internet has pretty much zero articles about her today. Well, other than mine, of course. Isn't there some saying about how being ignored is a worse fate than being vilified?

More Sucky Weather

Even my wife now says she is "tired of living in Seattle." Every day the idiots on the TV say that there is a "warmup on the way" and that it will be warmer and sunnier in the next few days. Then after that few days brings more weather that even Seattle would dislike they say, "Well, a few more days and it will happen." Yeah? Bite me.

I'm Still On Krugman

Paul Krugman takes to the op-ed page of the New York Times yesterday to illustrate just now narrow his vision is, penning a piece about how well Obama is actually treating business, despite the claims of business leaders who seem to feel that they are getting the short end of the stick from Obama’s administration.

I’d say Krugman is actually valid in all of his assertions, but misses a larger picture and a good part of why business has become disenchanted with Obama and liberals at large, and why they are feeling nervous about those liberals remaining in charge.

Obama and those who supported him passed “health care reform” largely by demonizing health insurance companies; by demanding that insurance companies be “held accountable,” and saying repeatedly that the American public was being “held hostage” by insurance companies. It was a year-long rant in which Obama, Democrats and the liberal portion of the media blamed insurance companies almost entirely for the high cost of health care and for all of the other undesirable features of our system.

The whole campaign became less about what it would do for the American public than about what it would do to health insurance companies.

The campaign to pass finance reform is shaping up in similar fashion; as a rant about the evils of financial institutions and about how their pillaging of the American people has to be stopped.

While there is element of truth in both campaigns, the degree with which the Obama campaign embraces the battle is understandably discouraging to the business affected by these campaigns. A business cannot help but be nervous when faced by a government who uses as one of the main tools in its arsenal a verbal onslaught of demonizing an entire business model in order to pass legislation it deems to be favorable. Even if that legislation itself is not hurtful to that business, the year-long verbal assault from the nation’s leadership is.

Obama has demonized insurance companies, financial institutions and the oil business in his first eighteen months in office. He may be right to do so, and these business may be so utterly disreputable that they need to be destroyed, but it’s hardly surprising that business leaders in general are feeling nervous and sensing that Obama dislikes them.

Hell, they’re waiting to see who his next target is.

Sucky Weather

If I'm going to have to put up with earthquakes, maniacial drivers and the likes of Duncan Hunter and Dianne Feinstein, not to mention watching Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina commercials, I at least want some warm weather and sunshine out of the deal. The daily high temperatures lately would be fine for hanging meat, and the sun conditions would suit you fine if you are a damned duck. Making pot roast today primarily because using the oven will help to warm up the stupid house. Does not whoever is in charge know that this is July, for pity's sake?

Olbermann Does Hilarity

Keith Olbermann spent the final segment of his show last night getting all snarky about the one-hour special scheduled for tonight on ESPN, during which LeBron James will at long last and with much fanfare announce which NBA team he will sign with for the future.

Given that I find NBA "basketball" about as exciting as watching a bunch of teenaged thugs having a street fight, I was tempted to tune him out, but I decided to watch and I'm glad I did. He was actually almost as funny as he thinks he is, and I was chuckling all the way through it.

But no, I am not planning on watching LeBron's special.

Government Statistics

The government is reporting that "retail sales" increased by a 4% last month, the best increase since Moses was a young child. You may get the idea that I am less than overwhelmed. That’s because I know how they come up with that number.

No, they do not collect all of the sales receipts from all of the stores in the nation and run them through their trusty adding machine. Just like they do with unemployment numbers, where people who quit looking for work are no longer unemployed, the government has a weird way of calculating the “retail sales” numbers that it reports.

They use the "same store sales" method, which consists of interviewing a list of stores, all of which have been open for more than one year, and asking them to report their sales relative to last year. Here’s the kicker; any store which doesn’t respond is assumed to have the same sales as the preceding year. They don’t check to see if that store failed to respond because it closed.

So, for instance, Best Buy says that its sales went up 30% and Circuit City doesn’t respond. The government averages that out and says that sales went up 15% from last year. But wait; did you say Circuit City?

Circuit City went out of business and is presently closed. Some of its customers went to Best Buy, which accounts for that company’s rise in business. Some of Circuit City’s customers went to a new business which wasn’t interviewed because it hasn’t been in business for more than a year. Some of Circuit City’s customers just said to hell with it and paid off some credit card debt.

There are lies, damned lies, and government statistics.

Whew

Another one at 5.4, followed by 4 more at 3.0+ in the next five minutes. More than 100 aftershocks in the next hour, and I am beginning to find this nonsense a little tiring. The cat is only now beginning to calm down.

One of the more interesting experiences in life, by the way, is having a cat on your lap when a 5.4 earthquake happens. You will need Neosporin and Band-aids.

And Krugman Yet Again

Paul Krugman is now suggesting that the government should borrow some of the “excess cash” that corporations are sitting on and use that to create some jobs because it is the same money that, if the corporations spent it, would create jobs. It’s a variation on the “all money is fungible” theme.

“I have never seen a coherent objection to this line of argument,” he says.

And you won’t get one from me either, Paul, because I’m all in favor of the government providing jobs when the private sector is not doing so. I think it’s a better idea than extended unemployment compensation, although some of that is probably needed as well, and I’m not concerned about a short term accumulation of federal deficit.

I even think it’s cool to play at overcoming the “deficit hawk” objections by saying that we should use the “excess cash held by corporations.” It’s a bit disingenuous, but in a clever and usefully argumentative manner, sort of Puckish, and I rather enjoyed it. (It's still government debt, of course, but...)

But then he goes and ruins the moment with his last sentence,

But the end result would be to put some of that idle cash to work — and, ultimately, to give the corporations a reason to start investing, too, so that the deficit spending would crowd investment in, not out.

[emphasis mine, J]  It is that which Krugman claims to have seen no “coherent objection” to, probably because everyone who has heard it has been rendered speechless by the sheer audacity of the non sequitur.

In what manner is private investment stimulated by government-provided jobs? Does business suddenly realize, “Hey the government is stealing my employees,” and resolve to steal them back? Do they suddenly decide to go into competition with the government for whatever business it is that the government is doing with those jobs?

He’s back to his, “FDR’s New Deal spending caused the economic boom,” a boom which didn’t happen until twenty years and a World War after the spending ended. He adds additional proof, rather oddly, in the form of “When the FDR tried to balance the budget in 1937 the economy promptly slid back into recession.” I’ve never been quite clear on how that proves that the spending was working to “restart the economy.”

So not only did the spending end before it caused the recovery, but there was a recession after it ended and before the recovery which was caused by it happened. And no “coherent objection” can be made against his cause and effect.

News That Doesn't Surprise Me

In a study that it probably didn't require rocket scientists to perform, it has been discovered that men who use Viagra and similar drugs get sexually transmitted diseases more often than men who don't use those drugs.

Why would it occur to anyone to even wonder about that?

Krugman Does It Again

Krugman responds in his blog today to a column by David Brooks in the same venue; or at least he seems to think he is responding to what Brooks is saying in his column. Krugman’s standard of proof is typically thin when he responds to Brooks’ assertion that “The Demand Siders don’t have a good explanation for the past two years.”

“Funny, I thought we had a perfectly good explanation: severe downturn in demand from the financial crisis, and a stimulus which we warned from the beginning wasn’t nearly big enough. And as I’ve been trying to point out, events have strongly confirmed a demand-side view of the world.”

Funny indeed, claiming that something didn’t work constitutes proof of theory in Paul Krugman’s world. If the stimulus actually had been bigger and if it actually had created recovery, that would have “strongly confirmed a demand-side view.” But merely claiming that, “If it had been bigger it would have worked,” does not prove anything to anyone who has an IQ above room temperature.

For a man with a Nobel and a stratospheric IQ, Paul Krugman tends to use the most lame and indefensible arguments of logic I can imagine. I’m open to his theories, but he has not proved them to me with the kind of arguments he has used so far.

Brooks goes on and asks a, to me, fairly reasonable question, “Are you sure your theorists are right and theirs are wrong?” In fact, I have asked that question here before, and have challenged the constant refrain that quotes Krugman’s theories as if they were facts rather than theories. Even if they worked one time, which is actually rather questionable itself, it remains only a theory that they will function in all circumstances. In response to Brooks’ question, Krugman immodestly replies,

“Yes, I am. It’s called looking at the evidence. I’ve looked hard at the arguments the Pain Caucus is making, the evidence that supposedly supports their case — and there’s no there there.”

He then goes on to “refute” the other side's theories by listing, not failures of recovery measures, but the economic collapse itself, and then finishes with another real treasure of modesty,

“The moral I’ve taken from recent years isn’t Be Humble — it’s Question Authority. And you should too.”

Question Authority, but don’t question Paul Krugman.

Eastern Heat Wave

For anyone confused by my comment regarding the littering of beaches in Pacific Beach and San Diego alcohol bans, Pacific Beach is not actually a separate town, merely a locality within San Diego.

Anyway, I wish we would get some of that Eastern heat wave, or some influence from the high pressure dominating the West. Due to the local "marine layer," June is usually cloudy and cool here, but the past month has been cooler than usual, and we are still waiting for a daily high above
66 degrees, even when the sun does come out.

Beaches, Booze and Trash

The Surfrider Foundation holds a rally on the 5th of July every year to clean up trash left on Pacific Beach (the town) beaches by holiday revellers. Two years ago they picked up 8000 pounds of crap. Then San Diego made the beaches an alcohol-free zone. Last year the Surfriders picked up about 2000 pounds of crap. This year it looks like about 1000 pounds.

Apparently drunks litter more than sober people do. Who knew?

Afghanistan Vortex Theory

There is a canyon near Sedona, AZ which is purported to have powers of some sort. I’ve never been quite clear on the precise nature of these powers, but they are concentrated in “spiritual energy vortexes,” and they are the reason for a significant portion of the tourism that Sedona draws.

Apparently Afghanistan has some sort of “terrorist energy vortexes” which we must prevent the would-be terrorists from accessing because, according to the sainted general of the Middle East, David Petraeus, we are fighting in Afghanistan to assure that,

“…al-Qaida and its network of extremist allies will not be allowed to once again establish sanctuaries in Afghanistan from which they can launch attacks on the Afghan people and on freedom-loving nations around the world."

Or, as President Obama put it in several speeches, we will “deny them the safe haven in which to plan their attacks.”

Apparently Petraeus and his Commander-in-Chief are on the same page, which is good news, but I’m wondering if they are reading the right book.
Or, perhaps, if they even know how to read. Being on the right page doesn't do much good if you don't know how to read the damned thing.

Anyway, they seem to believe that either the terrorists cannot plan or launch attacks from anywhere other than Afghanistan, which is clearly at odds with the evidence before us, or they think that any attacks planned or launched anywhere other than Afghanistan will be feckless affairs which will be ignominious failures.

There is some evidence supporting that second assumption. There is the “underpants bomber,” for instance, and then the guy in Times Square; both of whom conducted plots whose execution was exceeded in degree of ineptitude only by the planning. One was Yemeni in origin and the other Pakistani, so perhaps the terrorists do need access to that Afghanistan terrorist vortex that David Petraeus is protecting so carefully.

There are a couple of flaws in the Petraeus/Obama plan, however, even assuming that the “Afghanistan Terrorist Vortex” theory is correct. First is that the purpose of the terrorist is to terrify, and these plots manage to terrify the population of America, cause us to change our laws and our behavior, and waste our resources on defense even when they are inept and fail to accomplish the immediate objective. They don’t really need to blow anything up, they just need to make us think that they can do so.

The other is that the “We’re fighting them over there so that we don’t have to fight them over here,” has turned into, “They’re blowing us up over there because we’re making it unnecessary for them to blow us up over here.” And they just need to keep making us think they can blow us up over here to keep us letting them blow us up, financially if nothing else, over there.

Happy Birthday

Unfortunately, this is the only flag I'm flying today. I have one which flew over the U.S.S Arizona which I normally display, but on Flag Day I put it out and realized that it has become much too discolored and shabby to be flown. I have sent it to be cleaned, but do not have it back in time to display it today.

Patriotism is too often measured by the pin one wears on his lapel, or the manner in which he decorates the front of his home or office. I know what I wear inside, and I do not need to defend or advertise it.

Happy Birthday, America.

#3 Wrangler Chevrolet

This was a pretty sight, especially when it was the first car across the finish line, and it was hard not to enjoy the almost delirious babbling of Dale Junior after winning the race. That kid has not been this happy in a very long time. “This is not just for my fans,” he said, “This is for his fans too. I hope they enjoyed it.”

They did, Junior. Trust me, they truly did.

Leadership and Rhetoric

Boehner says that economic regulation is “using a nuclear bomb to attack an ant,” and Obama replies that he is “out of touch,” asks if we think the “economic crisis is an ant and we need an ant swatter to deal with it.” News pundits far and wide cheer Obama as having “scored some points.”

Scoring points is fine if you are playing basketball, but we don’t elect a president to play basketball. Obama did not rebut the policy endorsed by Republicans with that little piece of asinine rhetoric, nor does he do so when he claims that Republicans “just say ‘no’ to everything.” Engaging in point-scoring rhetoric is not going to solve the problems that face this nation, one of the largest of which is the lack of serious political dialog.

Democrats, Obama first among them, need to quit merely mocking the rhetoric used by the Republican and Tea Party speakers, and start seriously addressing the policies that they espouse. The despoilment of the Gulf of Mexico needed the hand of regulation to prevent it, and that kind of preventive regulation cannot be provided by the kind of “small government” advocated by the opponents to the Democratic Party. Democrats need to address that issue instead of merely playing rhetorical games over clumsy wording and cheap slogans.

We need a political leader in the White House, not a cheerleader.

A Nation Of Laws

Everyone drives at or below the speed limit on the freeway, right? Of course not. Why do people drive above the speed limit? Because the speed limit is inadequately enforced, and they are pretty sure they can get away with it.

People always stop for red lights, too. Like hell they do, and when a city installs cameras to catch them breaking the law by running red lights they cry “foul” and claim that because they do not like the method that was used to catch them breaking the law then they should not be punished.

Oil companies break safety regulations in drilling for oil because the government agencies responsible for enforcing the regulations are not doing enforcement, and the same people who are driving over the speed limit and running red lights are outraged that companies would violate the regulations which are not being enforced.

There is at best a tiny outcry against the agencies who are failing to enforce the regulations, about the same amount of outcry as there is at the lack of police enforcing the speed limit.

The vast majority of the vituperation is directed at those miscreant corporations who felt that the law did not apply to them, who felt that they could drill in any manner they wished merely because there was not a police officer looking over their shoulder at the moment.

I’m not entirely sure what I’m trying to say here, but if we want to be a nation of laws then shouldn’t we actually be a nation of laws?

Olbermann and Sharpton

I give Olbermann plenty of heat, but the man believes in liberalism and human rights and that is why I keep watching him. I don’t always like Al Sharpton, as he can be a bit reactionary at times, but I watch him for much the same reason I do Olbermann. They teamed up last night to provide an amazingly low key and very powerful condemnation of Glen Beck.

You can watch it here, and I recommend that you do so, but a highlight which struck me, in which Sharpton says,

From my study of history, those that claim to be the Tea Partiers and the followers and supporters of Mr. Beck and Mrs. Palin were the ones that today advocate the things that that march was against.

First of all, that march was to appeal to government to intervene and protect the rights of people. They are against big government. I mean, you don‘t have to get to race. Their idea of government and the idea that Dr. King and Roy Wilkins of—and others espoused is the exact opposite of what they‘re calling for. Dr. King met with Caesar Chavez and talked about how we protect people, no matter who they are, that come into the borders, and have a sound policy. They‘re the ones that are rallying against that. So I think that they are absolutely, unequivocally—I don‘t even have to get to the race side of this.

There’s a lot more, it is a remarkable and quite powerful segment, and it honors the memory and the cause of Dr. Martin Luther King.

Don Coryell

You can't live in this town without learning to speak that name with respect and fondness and, today, with sadness. The sport of football has lost a ledgend, and a great man. Neither the college nor the professional game would be what it is today without this man. He was unique, loved by the football community, and he will be missed.

Now, This Is A Reach

Nancy Pelosi wants to pass unemployment compensation extension because it creates jobs. Unemployment benefits creating jobs.

"It injects demand into the economy," Pelosi said, arguing that when families have money to spend it keeps the economy churning. "It creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name."

I am all in favor of extending unemployment benefits, but this is just ridiculous. This is carrying the "consumer spending-based economy" to an extreme that defies belief. This is creating an economy that consists entirely of consumer spending. Nancy Pelosi has just gone off the rails here.

Blinded by Theory

Paul Krugman shoots himself in the foot yesterday with his own rhetoric and doesn’t even know it. He utterly destroys his own Keynesian theory in “The Icelandic Post-crisis Miracle,” and seems to think that he has proven the validity of what he has been proposing for months, that we should pour more money into our failing economy and all will be well. The man is so blinded by his own theories that he cannot even see reality when he writes about it himself.

As an immediate reaction to the economic crash, every nation in the world went all Keynesian and created stimulus spending to “restart their economies” except Iceland. That country did, out of necessity since they had no money to spend for stimulus, what non-Keynesian economists suggest, which is to write off their bad debt and make the ones holding that debt take the loss.

You may recall that almost started a war between Iceland and England, since the English were mostly holding the Icelandic debt and they lost all of their money and were really, really pissed off about it.

The Keynesian countries, like the US, used taxpayer money to prop up and maintain the debt, and incurred even more debt in the form of stimulus spending. Krugman overlooks that part, he says those countries are “trying to rehabilitate themselves through austerity and deflation,” which sounded somewhat gratuitously snide to me.

Another way of looking at it would be that they tried stimulus spending and, seeing that it wasn’t working, are now trying something else. Yet another way would be that they have run out of money and credit and cannot any longer continue stimulus spending and are forced into “austerity and deflation.” Yet a third alternative would be that they got so freaked out by the amount of debt that they were running up…

Anyway, the situation is that those countries are out of money and have a large debt load. Iceland on the other hand, while it doesn’t have much in the way of money, also has no debt and its economy is rebounding and generating income. It is recovering far better than any other nation on Paul Krugman’s chart in every respect.

All of which proves that Keynesian economics is nonsense, or at least part of the time it is, a conclusion that Krugman manages to avoid completely.

The moral of the story seems to be that if you’re going to have a crisis, it’s better to have a really, really bad one. Otherwise, you’ll end up taking the advice of people who assure you that even more suffering will cure what ails you.

The point, Paul, which you miss, is that Iceland put the hurt on the people who were holding the debt and had been enriched by it, not on their own taxpayers. By refusing to impose pain on our enriched debt holders, we have put that pain onto our taxpayers; and the longer we refuse to harm the holders of the debt, the more badly we wind up harming our own taxpayers. Iceland didn’t have a uniquely bad crisis; unlike the rest of the world, they just had the right kind of crisis.

Iceland and Capitalism

Paul Krugman describes Iceland’s “great economic disaster stories of all time” in his post which I described in the article above, and I’m not sure if he is being ironic or if he doesn’t really realize how closely he is describing his own country. He says that their economy was,

…hijacked by a combination of free-market ideology and crony capitalism; one of the papers (pdf) at the conference I just attended in Luxembourg shows that the benefits of the financial bubble went overwhelmingly to a small minority at the top of the income distribution.

That sounds familiar. Are we sure he’s talking about Iceland? He finished,

And in the process of building short-lived financial empires, a handful of operators built up enormous debts that their fellow citizens are now expected to repay.

We would never do anything like that in this country, would we?

What happened is interesting, though. The “are now expected” that Krugman uses should actually be “were expected” because the Icelanders refused to pay up. They rioted in sort of a, “Hell no, we won’t pay,” reaction and physically threw the bankers and crony capitalists out of their offices.

In this country, not so much. I’m not really sure the general public is even aware that such debt exists, let alone who is expected to pay it.

Oh, Goody

With reference to the Petraeus hearings yesterday, it now seems that the President's withdrawal date of June 2011 from Afghanistan is "conditions based," or "subject to conditions on the ground."

Where have we heard that before?

Representing Liberalism

Keith Olbermann used to be a bastion of liberal journalism, but watching him today is like watching a nightmarish version of The Daily Show. He is almost totally devoted to presenting the “News and Commentary” as a mechanism for illustrating how intelligent and witty he is, something that he presumably developed from his protegee Rachel Maddow, and which would be more successful if he were as intelligent and witty as he thinks he is.

Last night he was ranting about how “BP‘s prime interest remains to protect its bottom line,” as if any for-profit corporation should have any other prime interest without risking having its management ousted by stockholders.

He also had Rick Steiner on, a supposed environmentalist, who claimed that the 40-knot wind threshold established for discontinuing drilling of the relief wells was too low and that they should not stop unless winds reached at least 60 knots. I love it; after criticizing BP for weeks about inadequate safety practice, he is now criticizing them for too much safety practice, and Olbermann is nodding and providing sage approval.

Olbermann also suggested that Former President Clinton had said that we might want to kill the Macando well by blowing it up. I saw a clip of him making the statement on a real news show, and what he actually said was, "Unless we need to blow up this well ... the Navy won't need to participate." [Emphasis mine, J] So yes, Keith, Clinton does know what he's talking about; it's actually you who does not.

As to Rachel Maddow, I liked her a lot during the presidential campaign, but survived only a few of her shows before her blatant bias, demagoguery and the endless giggling and snark caused me to decide I had better ways to spend my television watching time.

Once in while one of her clips makes the rounds of the blogs I read, touted as “ooh isn’t this wonderful,” and I break down and watch the clip. It’s usually… Well, she’s certainly, um, liberal. Being prepared and armed with facts is not her long suit, though.

In this piece about Obama’s presidency, in which the only accomplishment she failed to tout was that he walks on water, she actually starts by saying, “With the passage of financial regulation in Washington today…” She might want to check with Congress about what they actually did, perhaps. The financial reform measure is facing a final vote next week, and is actually in serious danger of failing to pass.

She declaims grandly that, “He passed health reform, which, for the first time, establishes government responsibility for the health care of American citizens,” a claim which goes beyond the usual Democratic hyperbole about this bill as being “historic.”

I’m not sure where she gets the part about “government responsibility” for anything. Insurance companies remain, for the most part, responsible for the health care of American citizens or, since they pay for that insurance, American citizens remain responsible for their own health care.

Of the stimulus bill, not only does she fail to mention that Obama allowed the Republicans to trim it by a third, she blats that, “It also pumped about $100 billion into the crumbling embarrassment of our national infrastructure and transportation system.”

That would have been a lot more impressive if that $100 billion had not lost much of its simulative punch by being spread out over several years, and for the fact that our infrastructure is in need of $7 trillion, so that amount was about 1.5% of the need.

She went on to say that the stimulus bill, “also included an unheralded but giant investment in science and tech,” which actually just proves what a confused and incoherent piece of legislation that bill actually was. Stimulus and investment are two entirely different things and do not belong in the same bill. Investment dilutes and detracts from the impact of stimulus.

She finishes with, “..the list of things he has yet to do – ‘Don‘t Ask, Don‘t Tell,’ closing Guantanamo - in each of these things, there is room for liberal disappointment. I sing a bittersweet lullaby to the lost public option when I go to sleep at night.”

Um, “he has yet to do?” How about, “things he has failed to do,” and in the case of closing Guantanamo, “things he almost certainly not going to do.” Not to mention the "public option" which she even mentions and which is far from a "yet to do" item.

So that’s what we have as representatives of liberalism in our television “News and Commentary” these days; buffoons.

Selective Vision

Again Paul Krugman makes an argument in the New York Times that he is right and the rest of the world is wrong, and again the left embraces him as if every theory that he pronounces is not a theory at all but is a fact cast in stone. Paul Krugman may have a Nobel Prize, but that does not magically turn his theories into facts.

I’m not arguing that he is wrong; I’m not qualified to say that he is wrong. I do say, however, that Paul Krugman uses history to make arguments that are convenient rather than necessarily accurate.

He cites, for instance that after some five years of deficit spending in the 1930’s when FDR made a “premature” effort to begin balancing the federal budget the economy slid back into recession, and uses that as proof that deficit spending is necessary to “restart the economy” now. I might suggest precisely the opposite; that if cutting off the stimulus after five years resulted in collapse, then it had not “restarted” anything; that the five years were lost years, permitting the economy to remain dormant with no reason to regain momentum so long as government spending was propping it up. So I see the moment which Krugman cites, in fact, as evidence that deficit spending does not "restart the economy."

My interpretation may be wrong, but it is just as reasonable as Krugman’s.

In any case, Krugman goes on to talk about the recovery period and deficit reduction in the 1950’s as justification for the Keynesian theory of government spending to “restart the economy,” without considering the effect of a four-year, immensely destructive, world wide war. I’m not referring to the government spending of war production here, but of the effect on the post war period of the 1950’s when the economic boom occurred. We were the sole nation able to produce the goods needed to rebuild a world reduced to rubble. We were an economy with an almost unlimited market and absolutely no competition.

In light of that, the connection between the economic boom of the 1950’s and government spending in the 1930’s with a world war in between might be a little tenuous.

Krugman has argued that the timing is good to incur debt because interest rates are low and so the government can run a large deficit without burdening its budget with major interest payments on that debt. This debt, however consists of term-limited bonds which must at some point be paid off or refinanced. What the interest rate will be when that happens is, of course, unknown, but it’s highly unlikely that it will be as low as it is now. So the budget impact of deficit spending might be low now, but it could become seriously crippling in the future.

There is a very valid and powerful argument to be made for interim spending as a “holding action” to serve the population presently devastated by the economy, but it should be done thoughtfully and with regard to its future consequences, and it should be accompanied by reduction of other, less necessary spending. Justifying the reckless increase of debt without end by selective arguments and interpretive history to support pet theories is not the answer.

Mission: Fail

The mission in Afghanistan is still as amorphous as the one in Iraq was in the days of George Bush. What we are doing and why we are doing it seems to depend on the day of the week, the person speaking on behalf of the government, and possibly the phase of the moon. One of the most popular, though, is the most absurd and least believable of all, but it is the one that most appeals to the fears of the American people, as stated by CIA Director Leon Panetta on ABC’s “This Week,”

“Our purpose, our whole mission there, is to make sure that Al Qaeda never finds another safehaven from which to attack this country. That’s the fundamental goal of why the United States is there,” he said. “And the measure of success for us is: do you have an Afghanistan that is stable enough to make sure that never happens.”

That absolutely infuriates me. The attacks of 9/11/2001 were planned in Hamburg, Germany and in two cities in the United States. The actual perpetrators came mostly from Saudi Arabia; not one of them came from Afghanistan. They did not train for their mission in Afghanistan, they did that in Ft Lauderdale and San Diego.

The only role that Afghanistan played was that Osama bin Laden lived there at the time. His organization provided funding, using banks located in nations other than Afghanistan, and he authorized the final go-ahead for the attack. He could have done that from anywhere in the world. He could have done it from downtown Washington, DC.

Osama bin Laden is no longer in Afghanistan. We think he is in Pakistan, but we don’t really know where he is, and it apparently doesn’t matter. The original invasion of Afghanistan was for the purpose of destroying that man and his cadre, but after that mission failed we did not leave, we simply changed the mission to God only knows what and stayed.

Since none of the reasons we keep making up for conducting a military occupation of Afghanistan make any sense, we keep having to make up additional reasons, which also make no sense. We keep, therefor, returning to the reason which most appeals to American fears, the “safehaven from which to attack us” reason. This reason is usually accompanied on television by pictures of Arabs with rifles doing calisthenics or playing on some sort of jungle gym; presumably in their “safe haven” and in preparation for their attack on us.

The latest attack on us was the Times Square incident, which was planned in this country, by one of our own citizens, with training provided by the Taliban in Pakistan. And still we are “at war” in Afghanistan to “deny al Queda safehaven from which to attack us.”

Wrong country, wrong group, wrong goal, and still we trumpet this mindless fear mongering drivel in justification of endless war.

We have this insane goal of keeping al Queda out of Afghanistan, as if it could not harm us from any other location. If it gets back into Afghanistan we are doomed, but as long as it is hiding somewhere else it is harmless. Either it cannot plan attacks anywhere other than in Afghanistan, or the attacks it plans elsewhere will be feckless affairs doomed to failure and which we need not fear. We need only keep them out of Afghanistan and all will be well.

The Times Square attempt would seem to disprove this theory, but...

Senate Insanity

A the risk of being seen to lack sympathy for Senator Byrd's family and constituency, why does a state elect to the Senate, for a six-year term, a man who is 89 years old, visibly frail, and known to be in poor health? There is, of course, the question of why the man continued to seek that office, but why would the voters choose him?

I don't doubt that the people of the State of West Virginia loved the man, but electing a Senator is serious business. I love my cat, too, but I'm not going to vote for her as Senator from California. I want somebody who represents my interests and whom I know can serve out the term of office. His most recent election has baffled me since it occurred.

The More Things Change...

Danica Patrick returned to "stock cars" yesterday, and the result was familiar. She was "advancing to the rear" when she tangled with Morgan Shephard early, which sent her to pit road for new tires and minor repairs. She wanted Shepard, who was racing stock cars before she was born, penalized. "Don't you get some kind of penalty for that or something?" she asked crew chief Tony Eury, Jr. No, not when you do not give another car enough room to maintain his line and he hits you.

She went a total of five laps down to the leader after that, and of course blamed the car. "At least we were able to keep racing. But I think it may have changed the car. I didn't have any bite in the corners after that."
I guess that depends on how you define "racing," but there was some inconsequential sheet metal damage to the fenders on her car; Loudon is not a high-speed, aerodynamic track.

The Queen of Hype now has 4 "stock car" races with a best finish of 30th.

The Fallacy of History

Like most people of liberal bent, which may be an oversimplification, I have long liked and admired Paul Krugman. He is, however, beginning to wear a bit thin on me as his writing strikes me more and more as taking a tone of certainty that suggests that his theories are not theories but are facts, and that anyone who disagrees with him is on the same order as people who believe that the Earth is flat.

His main point of contention is that the government needs to spend large amounts of money to “restart the economy,” and that doing so will replicate the results of FDR’s “New Deal” which, Krugman maintains, brought the country out of the Great Depression.

I don’t have a Nobel and am not really qualified to dispute his theories, but he supports his theories more with history rather than logic, and I can read history every bit as well as he can. In using history to support his assertion, he bases his argument on the assumption that because two things happened in sequence then one of those things necessarily caused the other. I don’t buy that assumption, and in any case if one looks closely the two things that he juxtaposes, they did not really happen in quite the precise manner that he claims.

The “New Deal” certainly reduced unemployment, but did it “restart the economy” as Krugman claims? The reduction of unemployment consisted of the make-work jobs provided by the WPA projects and the CCC camp projects, which provided a way for workers to feed their families and get off of the “dole.” But was this nation experiencing any king of surge in manufacturing, or production of any kind, prior to World War Two? If so it doesn’t show up in any of the history books that I read, and that doesn’t look like a “restarted economy” to me.

World War Two certainly didn’t “restart the economy” in any meaningful way. The economic energy of the nation was entirely devoted to the war and from a consumer standpoint the economy got, if anything and in some ways, worse. There was something approaching full employment, of course, but nothing much to buy with the proceeds of that employment.

The phenomenal recovery and growth that Krugman cites, and the period that he uses as evidence that national debt is not problematic since the economy can grow at a pace that renders it irrelevant, is post-war 1950’s.

To suggest that we can replicate that today requires thinking that is on the order of delusional. That was a time when the entire industrial world was in rubble with the exception of The United States. The world needed to rebuild and was hungry for goods, and we were the only nation which had the means of producing those goods. We had an unlimited market demand and absolutely no competition. Of course we experienced phenomenal growth.

Today we are faced with a world saturated with both goods and the means of producing them. We are faced with almost no present market demand and enormous competition. Our competitors are eager and aggressive to secure the gain of filling what little demand there is remaining, and they have the wherewithal to do it.

So I see Krugman’s historical evidence coming unhinged on two grounds.

It was not the “New Deal” that “restarted our economy,” but rather the need to rebuild a world shattered by war. It seems to me that the “New Deal” was nothing more than a holding action which allowed the country to manage its affairs until other causes turned the tide in our favor. Such a holding action may be needed now, providing temporary jobs to allow presently unemployed workers to feed their families until other factors change the economy, but in terms of that spending “restarting our economy” I do not think that history proves it.

The other fallacy is that history proves anything when conditions are so vastly different. What we were able to do in a war-shattered world as the sole producing nation is by no means illustrative of what we can expect of our economy in today’s environment, and to suggest that the times do not change the theory borders on idiotic.

Ah, Springtime

Spring has sprung, the grass has riz,
I wonder where the Zonies is.

I'll tell you where the Zonies is; the Zonies is in San Diego escaping the heat. "Zonies," for those of you who don't know, are people from Arizona visiting San Diego during the summer.

After our City Council passed a resolution condemning Arizona's new law regarding the authority of police to request residence papers, our local paper and tourism council got many letters from people that state saying that they no longer liked our city and would not visit us any more. Then the temperatures in Arizona topped 100, and I am seeing a great many Arizona license tags in San Diego. Seems their outrage has been tempered by the Arizona summer heat. Color me amazed.

Getting The Picture (updated)

Yesterday I spoke about the lack of informational leadership. Today we have a sample of just how difficult it is to get an accurate picture of what is actually happening in the Gulf of Mexico, as the news media distorts the picture in both directions. Some want to scare us to death with the hysterical rantings of idiots, and some seek to calm the public with soothing platitudes and inaccurate reassurances.

Case in point, an AP story headlined on Salon as, “Tropical storm Alex not on track for Gulf.” In the article itself they approach slightly closer to accuracy, saying that, “prediction models no longer have it going across the oil spill,” but they make no mention of it having any effect on the management of the crisis.

Here is NOAA’s storm track prediction, which clearly belies Salon’s headline; Alex is certainly headed for the Gulf. While the likely track does not directly impact the Deepwater Horizon site, a storm’s effects are felt for many miles and if the storm strengthens, as it is predicted to do over the warm waters of the Gulf, winds and waves could seriously affect control efforts with the storm track as shown.


We get significant sea effects in San Diego from tropical Pacific storms that are much farther away than the track projected by NOAA for Alex, and the article as published by Salon utterly fails to convey any sense of a need for concern about this storm as to either well control or cleanup efforts.

My point here is not the possibility of problems presented by the storm, but the nature of the article as published by Salon, which conveys a sense that the storm is a non-issue with respect to Deepwater Horizon and that it is symptomatic of the lack of real coverage that we are getting. That is why leadership in terms of providing information to the public matters, and why the lack of it today is so serious.

Update: Saturday, 2:45pm
The latest track from NOAA shows Alex tending much more westerly, which lessens the liklihood of it impacting Deepwater Horizon and is very good news. That does not alter my point about the nature of AP's and Salon's reporting.

Leadership and Information

San Diego has had two major fires since 2000. The first was in 2005 and the Fire Chief was a man named Jeff Bowman. He would conduct daily briefings which were shown on television and which I found helpful and reassuring. He stood in front of a large map which showed the current boundaries of the fire and would point out precisely where the fire was presently advancing, where his crews were, where he was moving them and what they were doing. He would say things like, “We have the fire at a stop here and are doing cleanup operations, so we have moved most of those crews over here where the fire is still advancing at five miles per hour.”

In 2007 the Chief was a woman named Jarman who was undoubtedly well qualified, but she communicated very poorly. She stood in front of a map on which the fire lines seldom changed at all and were poorly defined, never referred to the map other than in very vague terms, and used technical terms that few if any of her audience understood. As a result, I was frustrated by not knowing where the fire was at any given time and having
no idea where it was going. Was it approaching my neighborhood?

I was reminded of the difference between the two when listening to Obama’s White House address regarding the Gulf oil disaster. That speech left me restless and discontent. That disaster had been unfolding with rumor and accusation, and there is no clear sense of the actual scope of the disaster itself or of the response to it. When the address was announced I thought that maybe we would finally get some clarity on the situation, but all we got was some platitudes.

Matt Zoller Seitz, in a Salon article Tuesday which was about the Daily Show, had a statement that partially said it,

Stewart's remarks suggested (accurately, I think) that what the nation really wanted and needed was a frank assessment of the oil spill: how bad it was, how bad it was going to get, whether BP or the government could do anything about it in the short term, and if so, how long it might take. The lead "action" in Obama's report to the country was the creation of a blue-ribbon panel to study the problem and recommend long-term policies on drilling and environmental safety.

So as the Deepwater Horizon disaster continues to unfold the public continues to be “informed” by rumor and sensationalism, because our leadership is too busy being cautious and politically correct to provide us with real, unbiased information.

Keith Olbermann is a Jackass

Of course Olbermann discussed the McChrystal replacement story at great length last night without ever once mentioning or referring to his "Special Comment" of the night before in which he recommended the brilliant stroke of not replacing McChrystal. Last night the acceptance of McChrystal's resignation was not only a masterstroke of genius on Obama's part, it was the only possible choice available to him. How it could be both of those things at one and the same time is a bit unclear, but then we are dealing with the mind (?) of Keith Olbermann here.

He also touted a story posted on "The Oil Drum" which describes and prophesies an Armageddon-like doom scenario in the Gulf of Mexico. He admitted that they had no idea of the identity or credentials of the author of the piece, but nonetheless managed to lend considerable weight to it. I follow that website regularly, and had already read the piece and discarded it as the hysterical rantings of an idiot with a smattering of knowledge and no real expertise, but I guess we cannot expect Olbermann to be as discriminating when the prospect of dramatic "news" is in the offing.

Getting It Right

I’d say President Obama got it just about as near perfect as could be expected. My preference would be for him to reject McChrystal’s resignation and fire him, but if he believes that this better serves his relationship with the military that is certainly his call and I’m not prepared
to question his judgement on it. That’s why he is president and I’m not.

His naming of Petraeus as replacement is very interesting indeed, and probably also a really good choice in that it provides continuity not just for the war itself, but with regard to our relationship with the Afghan leadership. The latter is not a small consideration by any means, and serving that purpose without actually stating it is excellent.

The former is something that I actually regard as a disadvantage, because I am among those who regard counterinsurgency as a failed doctrine, and naming Petraeus means the doctrine will continue in Afghanistan. (That comes as no surprise, of course, but one could always hope.) It worked, more or less, in Iraq because we were able to bribe the Al Anbar tribes to join our side, but that was not part of the doctrine itself, and it is not something we are going to be able to do in Afghanistan.

That’s a different subject, though, and as to the McChrystal situation itself, I’m more than happy with the way Obama has resolved it.

Tropical Storm Potential

Only 30% at this point, but moving West and/or Northwest.

Olbermann is Delusional

Keith Olbermann delivered himself of a “Special Comment” last night that was as thoroughly delusional and incoherent as anything I have ever heard him say. It is redundant to say that Olbermann “doesn’t get it,” because that is almost always the case with him, but this comment contained so much contradiction and delusion that even coming from him it had me staring at the screen in slack-jawed amazement.

First he roundly condemned McChrystal for his violation of a principle of American governance, talking about the revelation of McChrystal’s reported discussion of his superiors as reported in Rolling Stone.

…that the comments are inappropriate and inconsistent with the traditional relationship between military and civilian authority and are thus intolerable. We can honor his service, the way we honor the service of General Curtis LeMay, or the way we honor the service of General Douglas MacArthur, forever blemished, forever compromised, forever instructive that however much credit each heroic soldier deserves, he and his comrades are not the masters of this country, but its employees.

It is the fundamental tenet on which this nation rests; it is what has kept us from any serious dalliance with a militaristic government in all our long history; it is the simple balanced poetry that has saved us from the threat of military overthrow and dictatorship for 234 years, while nearly all the other great nations of the world, from Germany to Japan, have succumbed to it, again and again.

Long-winded and pretentious as it is, it is also very true. He then goes on to say, in a rather incredibe stroke of self-contradiction,

And that is when, Sir, you should take General McChrystal‘s resignation, and fold it up, and put it in your top drawer, and tell him that that is where it will remain, and that as of now you are not accepting it.

Does Olbermann know the actual meanings of the words that he uses in these “Comments,” or does he merely look them up in the thesaurus and throw them in there because they sound good? Does he know the meaning of the word “intolerable?” Having referred to McChrystal’s actions as “intolerable,” he then says that Obama should tolerate them; that he should not accept the general’s resignation. There seemed to be several reasons for this rather bizarre suggestion.

First came the “he‘s not getting out of this morass he helped create.” I think that’s related to Colin Powell’s “Crate and Barrel” thing of “you broke it you own it” or it may be a less noble concept of “you aren’t leaving me stuck with this mess,” but in either case it’s nonsense.

Then there’s the political angle, right up Olbermann’s alley and something that only he, or perhaps Chris Matthews, could come up with,

And then, Sir, you sit back and watch the political world‘s collective jaw drop. This would not be mere contrariness, nor even the satisfying destabilization of the entire political climate, although those would be fun, too.

Oh, sure, watching the abrogation of a fundamental principle of American governance would be “fun.”

Olbermann then spends what seemed like twenty minutes declaiming, in a dazzling non sequitur, that Obama should not fire McChrystal because Bush did fire a lot of generals who disagreed with him. Olbermann fails to note that Bush’s generals did not refer to Bush and his staff as “clowns” and such, they respectfully offered input prior to decisions having been made which Bush did not want to hear. Not quite the same thing as a general who is repeatedly told to quit stating publicly that he disagrees with presidential decisions and refuses to do so.

He then says that by not firing McChrystal, Obama would have him in the palm of his hand; that McChrystal would then become beholden to him in a fashion that would assure future compliance. Not only would he earn McChrystal’s undying loyalty, but the entire military establishment would then see Obama in a new light.

You would be the President who defended General McChrystal after he humiliated himself. You would be the leader sensitive to the military, and its needs, and its failures, and its pressures.

That is utterly delusional. One does not obtain the respect and loyalty of one’s subordinates by allowing those subordinates to openly disrespect you and walk all over you, allowing them to disobey your orders, and then say all is well and we will move forward from here. The problem with McChrystal is not his actions, it is his attitude, and orders may change his actions but they will not change his attitude. And McChrystal didn't "humiliate himself," he disrespected his superiors and dishonored his uniform.

Olbermann then babbled something about “listening to his generals.” I think the gist of it was that Obama should not fire McChrystal so that he would be listening to his generals because Bush listened to his generals, but that is sort of in conflict with his earlier thing about how he should not do what Bush did do. I was having trouble keeping up with him by the time we got to this point, partly because he’d been abusing the thesaurus too much.

Finally there was the inevitable thing about President Lincoln; in this case about Lincoln appointing a general who was a liar and a braggart. McChrystal is certainly no shrinking violet, but where did the “liar” thing come from? If he's intimating that the Lincoln principle of "I need capable generals, not polite generals" applies, that is rather at odds with his earlier, “he‘s not getting out of this morass he helped create.”

POTUS v. McChrystal

I need to reflect on this at more length, but my initial reaction is that Obama should definitely not accept McChrystal's resignation. He should reject the resignation and then fire him. I'm inclined to think he should withdraw his commission. Military respect for civilian authority is too important to trifle with.

Left Wing Demagoguery

Olbermann and others on the left have been hyperventilating about a BP memo discovered recently which "discloses that they were lying about the amount of oil leaking" from the blown-out well in the Gulf. It is claimed that, rather than the 1000 barrels per day, later revised to 5000 bpd, and then higher yet, the memo shows that they knew that it was actually 100,000 barrels per day from the beginning. What the memo actually says,

A BP estimate made after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon noted that as much as 100,000 barrels per day could leak into the ocean if the blowout preventer and wellhead were removed, a higher worst-case scenario than previously reported.

[Emphasis mine.] That's a little different than "they knew that it was actually 100,000 barrels per day from the beginning."

I have no problem with criticism of BP, in general or for their actions with respect to the Deepwater Horizon and its aftermath, but there are plenty of legitimate arguments to be made against them. Making stuff up is just not needed, and I dislike demagoguery as much from the left as I do when it comes from the right.

The Magic Word

The magic word is “terrorist.” Put that word in a piece of legislation and it is guaranteed to pass, regardless of what the legislation actually does. Use that word in a political speech and the public and media will support you wholeheartedly, without regard to whatever else you say in the speech. Incorporate that word in a law passed by Congress and the Supreme Court will uphold the law regardless of its actual content.

First Amendment free speech has always had some limitations. You may not, for instance, falsely scream “Fire” in a crowded theatre, and you may not directly advocate the performance of illegal activity. Until a recent decision by the Supreme Court, though, it has never been against the law to speak in a perfectly legal manner and have it be deemed against the law merely because you are speaking on behalf of a group that the government has deemed to be a terrorist organization.

To be in “support of terrorism” you had to be speaking in a manner that actually supported the terrorist activity, but no longer is that the case. If you support the fully legal activity of an organization that also performs terrorism you are, according to the Supreme Court, guilty of supporting terrorism.

Osama and Company have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. The purpose of terrorism is to terrorize, and they have convinced the American people, American military, American government, and now the American Supreme Court to act with terror-stricken, irrational, fear-driven behavior.

Fiscal Responsibility

A couple of things which seem to be baffling the likes of Paul Krugman is, first, that politicians are talking about cutting spending balancing the budget in the face of a still-fragile economy and, second, that they are doing so despite public opinion that is overwhelmingly more worried about jobs than they are about the federal deficit.

Krugman is not the only one wondering about this, I’ve seen quite a lot of commentary regarding the second puzzle. People in these polls expressed little concern about the deficit, but the jobs issue is high in the polling, and yet government is suddenly talking about “financial responsibility” and these pundits cannot understand why. One California editor commented that since the primaries are now past, the rhetoric could swing from all of the “partisan cost cutting nonsense” and return to a focus on generating jobs. It has, of course, not done so.

The answer to that puzzle is that first, the poll asks about the federal deficit, and people truly do not care about the federal deficit. They care about trash collection, potholes in their streets, ballpark construction and clean beaches; they do not care about the deficit.

Taxes now, they care about taxes. They are against taxes, and that’s what all of this “financial responsibility” talk is about. Is there a connection between federal spending, taxes and the federal deficit? No, not in the mind of the average voter. Hell, in the mind of a significant number of voters there is not even a connection between federal spending and taxes.

California’s governance is almost entirely done by public initiative now; voters pass some 90% of spending initiatives, and they vote down 100% of tax initiatives. Those which are revenue neutral, ones which spend money but also raise a tax to provide the money to fund the project or charge fees for it, fail at about an 95% rate.

Americans want the government to provide services, protection and facilities, but they do not want to pay taxes. Voters may not be worried about the federal deficit, but they are worried about taxes. There is a constant clamor for increasing the provisions and decreasing taxes. That clamor is fed by the politicians of both parties, who endlessly promise in every campaign at every level to do precisely that.

No, the voters don’t want the budget balanced and they don’t care about the deficit. They do care about “fiscal responsibility,” though, when that phrase is used as code for “low taxes.” At this point the public does want the government to provide jobs, and health care, and unemployment benefits, and clean seas. They also want taxes reduced and lower gasoline cost. And free lunch; don’t forget the free lunch.

I Don't Get It

Right now there is a war in Afghanistan which by most accounts is going badly; there is horribly increasing violence in Iraq; the economy is still on very shaky footing; and the outrage of the day is that Tony Hayward went to a freaking yacht race.

Instead of doing what, precisely? How would his eschewing watching the yacht race have in any way affected cleanup of the oil disaster in the Gulf?

President Obama watched a baseball game and played golf; where is the outrage over that? Not that I think there should be, I think it is perfectly appropriate for him to do that; as do, apparently, all of the media mavens. We do not expect a president, with the weight of the entire nation and trillions of dollars in his hands to work 24/7/365, but apparently we do expect the head of a corporation a fraction of the size of a nation to do so.

There are plenty of legitimate grounds upon which to castigate Tony Hayward, for heaven's sake, we don't need to indulge in this kind of nonsensical posturing. Indeed, when we do so we diminish the impact of legitimate complaint.

Such is the nature of our political discourse today. We engage in so much nonsensical posturing that the real critique gets lost in the noise.

Feinstein is a Democrat

"We have 99 weeks of unemployment insurance now. The question becomes how long do you continue it before people just don't go back to work at all?" Sen. Feinstein said.

She did vote for extension of benefits, but...